The 96-Year-Old Startup Behind Your Shower Curtain

There is a company that has been in nearly every American bathroom for the better part of a century, and most people have never said its name out loud. It is called Mayzon. If you have ever slid a shower curtain along a tension rod, hung a caddy over the showerhead, replaced a plastic liner after it went cloudy, or assembled a wobbly shelf that fits over the toilet tank, there is a good chance the product came from a Mayzon plant - even if the box on the shelf said something else entirely.

That invisibility is not an accident. Mayzon sits in the part of the consumer-goods economy that shoppers rarely think about: the design, sourcing and manufacturing of everyday bath and home-fashion goods, sold both under its own brands and under the private labels of the retailers who stock them. It is an unglamorous business. It is also a durable one. The company traces its start to 1929, which makes it older than the Great Depression, the interstate highway system and the modern shower curtain rod it helped popularize.

01 / What it makesThe boring aisle, mapped

Walk the bath section of a home-improvement store and you are walking through Mayzon's catalog. The company describes itself as a designer, manufacturer and marketer of bath accessories and home-fashion products. In practice that means a long, specific list: shower rods, hooks and rings, shower curtains and liners, bath furniture, shower caddies, medicine cabinets and mirrors, window curtains and rods, bath mats, laundry tubs, bathroom safety hardware and a broad range of storage and organization pieces.

These are not products people research for months. They are replaced on a schedule, bought under mild pressure - the old liner finally gave out - and chosen mostly on fit, price and looks. That is exactly the kind of category where a manufacturer with scale and a long institutional memory has an edge.

The breadth matters more than any single item. A company that makes only shower curtains lives and dies with one shelf. A company that makes the curtain, the rod it hangs from, the rings that hold it, the caddy inside the shower, the mat outside it, the cabinet above the sink and the shelf over the toilet can build a relationship with a retailer that spans the whole department. When a buyer wants to refresh an entire section, it is easier to call one supplier who can ship all of it than to stitch together a dozen. That coverage is Mayzon's quiet moat.

02 / The brand familyOne company, four front doors

Most consumers meet Mayzon through Zenna Home, the flagship brand it launched in 2015 and has since built into a recognized name in bath. But the parent runs several doors into the same house, each aimed at a different buyer.

03 / How it makes moneyTwo channels, one factory

The business model has two halves that feed the same plants. The first is private label: Mayzon designs and manufactures products that appear on shelves under a retailer's own brand. The second is its named brands, led by Zenna Home. Both move through the same retail network - home-improvement stores, department stores, supermarkets, specialty home-decor shops and online marketplaces including Amazon and Walmart.

Selling into private label is a discipline of its own. The retailer owns the brand and the customer relationship; the supplier owns the cost curve, the tooling and the reliability. Margins are thinner than on a hot direct-to-consumer launch, but volumes are steady and the demand does not evaporate when a marketing campaign ends - people keep needing liners and rods regardless of the economy. It is a business built for endurance rather than spikes, which is roughly what a company approaching its hundredth year would want.

The company has grown the way old manufacturers tend to: organically, and by absorbing neighbors. It launched Zenna Hospitality in 2020, acquired RGI Home in 2021, and in 2022 pulled three established bath companies - Maytex, Zenith Home Products and Decolin - under the single Mayzon name, uniting offices, plants and warehouses across the United States and Canada. Since December 2017 the whole operation has been backed by the private-equity firm ONCAP, part of Onex.

04 / The clever partAn antimicrobial shower curtain

The most telling recent move is small and specific. In 2023 Mayzon partnered with Microban to build antimicrobial technology into shower curtains, towels and bath mats. The pitch is practical rather than futuristic: the treatment resists the stain- and odor-causing bacteria, mold and mildew that make bath textiles go grimy, which means the products last longer and need washing less often.

It is a neat trick of category thinking. A shower curtain is one of the most replaced objects in a home. Make it resist the thing that forces the replacement, and you have quietly turned a throwaway into something closer to a considered purchase - and given retailers a reason to stock a premium version next to the basic one.

05 / The people questionA company with its own university

Manufacturing at scale is a labor story as much as a machinery one, and Mayzon leans into it. The company runs an internal program it calls Mayzon University for recruiting, onboarding, training and internal advancement - an unusual amount of structure for a maker of bath hardware, and a signal of where it thinks its durability actually comes from. Its stated view is blunt: capacity is worthless without the people to run it.

The company also publishes a Forced Labour and Child Labour in Supply Chains policy and says it uses sustainable materials and processes "whenever possible in every facet of our business." For a supplier whose products pass through global sourcing before landing on a domestic shelf, supply-chain conduct is not a side note; it is part of what large retail partners now require.

06 / Where it fitsThe middle of the value chain

In a decade obsessed with direct-to-consumer brands and their glossy marketing, Mayzon occupies the opposite position: the maker other brands rely on. Its competitors are the other suppliers and private-label specialists of the bath and home-fashion world - names like iDesign, Kenney, Croydex and Bath Bliss - along with more visible storage brands such as mDesign and Simplehuman in adjacent aisles. What sets Mayzon apart is less any single product than its combination of age, category breadth and control over design, sourcing and manufacturing at once.

The broader lesson is one that flashier categories tend to forget. There is real, defensible money in the products people buy without a second thought - the ones that wear out, get replaced, and never earn a mention. Mayzon has spent almost a century proving it, one shower rod at a time, and the antimicrobial curtain is its argument that even the most ordinary object in the room still has room to get better.